Recent research efforts into food science have been increasingly focused in developing compositions comprising a reduced amount of natural sweetener without compromising the preferred sweet taste. Although naturally-occurring carbohydrate sweeteners, such as sucrose, are the most widely used sweeteners, they suffer from the disadvantages of high cost and high caloric content. Artificial sweeteners have been designed that overcome these problems but they are sometimes rejected by the consumer for not having a sufficiently “sucrose-like” taste. Artificial sweeteners have different sweetness profiles from that of sucrose and often suffer from side effects such as delays in the onset of sweetness perception and/or unpleasant aftertastes.
The perception of sweet taste is mediated by T1R2 and T1R3 G-protein coupled receptors. Heterodimers of T1Rs are necessary for the detection of sweet stimuli. FIG. 1 shows the interaction of the heterodimeric sweet receptor and selective sweet ligands, demonstrating the structural diversity of agonists and their different binding sites. Taste modulators do not directly activate taste receptors; they are able to interact with the receptor and influence the binding affinity of direct agonists.
Certain sweet taste enhancers are already described in literature. Ley et al. (“Enhancers for Sweet Taste from the World of Non-Volatiles: Polyphenols as Taste Modifiers,” Sweetness and Sweeteners, ACS Symposium Series, 979 (25), 400-409 (2008)) characterized hydroxylated benzoic acid amides. Servant et al. (“Positive allosteric modulators of the human sweet taste receptor enhance sweet taste,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107 (10), 4746-4751 (2010)) determined three compounds with sweet enhancing character and suggest that these compounds enables a stabilization of the closed form of the Venus flytrap domain of the T1R2-subunit.
Thus, there is an increasing interest in the food industry in taste modulators due to their ability to improve the sweet taste of products by masking and reducing the perception of undesirable flavors while optimizing and enhancing positive sweetness. Despite progress in developing methods for identifying new taste modulators, there is still a need for oral compositions that include sweetness modulators. Moreover, the high demand for low- or non-caloric, natural and synthetic sweeteners has promoted further development of sweet taste modulators as low-cost, low-caloric alternatives that would reduce the quantity of natural or artificial sweeteners in orally delivered products.
In particular, there is a need for a new sweetness modifier which is capable of increasing the sucrose equivalence of a sweetener. Furthermore, there is a need for a sweetener composition that is capable of increasing the sucrose equivalence, as well as, modifying the perception of sweet flavor of the sweetener, the aftertaste of the sweetener, the sweetness onset period of the sweetener, the sweetness peak period of the sweetener and/or the sweetness decay period of the sweetener. Human sweet taste receptors adapt to the perception of sweet taste over time to decrease: (1) maximum intensity of taste perception experienced, (2) total amount of taste perception experienced and (3) total duration of taste perception experienced. The sweet taste modifiers disclosed herein affect human sweet taste receptors to result in an increased (1) maximum intensity of taste perception experienced, (2) total amount of taste perception experienced and (3) total duration of taste perception experienced.